Worst Case Scenario
by JazziePerson
Summary: Song'verse: Story 2. Based on the song What Sarah Said by Death Cab for Cutie. Harry's Perspective of a tragedy.


Author's Note: Sorry, I know I said it would be out soon but I've been really busy. Please read and review. Thanks. I don't own anything, not the song or the characters.

Worst Case Scenario

And it came to me then that every plan  
Is a tiny prayer to father time  
As I stared at my shoes in the ICU  
That reeked of piss and 409

The smell of disinfectant was burning Harry's nose. It lingered in the back of his throat and made his eyes water. His vision blurred but he blinked it away, determined. Determined to do what, he didn't know. Be strong, don't cry, remain sane. Whatever. He had to stay focussed. For Nikki. He had to stay calm, objective because if he didn't, then... Then. One step at a time.

He looked around distractedly. The ICU waiting room was packed with frantic, anxious people, all waiting for news of their loved ones. People like Harry. Hoping desperately that their loved one would be okay, that they'd fight their way through the surgery and come out the other side, still breathing, still fighting. It didn't take much, to land someone in the ICU or surgery and their family and friends in the waiting room from hell. Whether it was a car accident, a random act of violence, targeted attack or whatever it was, it turned the world upside down and confused everything.

Every single person dealt with it their own way. Some people were wearing blood, like war paint, evidently having seen more of whoever they had been waiting for than Harry had of Nikki. Some stared avidly at the ground, as if the patterns in the plastic floor would spell the prophecy they wanted to hear from the doctors. And some paced, almost wearing holes in the floor in their desperation and fear.

But Harry was just frozen. His mind had gone into lockdown the moment he'd got the call from Leo to meet him at the hospital. Something had happened to Nikki while they'd been at the crime scene examining a body. She was on the way to the hospital. Bad way... Not breathing... The words tumbled around Harry's head, mixing together and losing meaning. The only thought in his dormant brain was that Nikki had to be alright and the tired question of why Leo hadn't arrived yet.

And I rationed my breaths as I said to myself  
That I've already taken too much today

Not breathing... That was what stayed with Harry the strongest. The rest was just a bundle of noise and random sound but that was stuck in his head. If she'd stopped breathing... He had to stop thinking like that. It would be fine. Everything would be fine. Nikki had got hurt before but she'd been fine, she always recovered. That was what made her, her. She never gave up. She was probably the most danger-prone person he'd ever met but it never lasted, she was always okay. She had to be okay. She would start breathing again, she would. She had to.

Harry was suddenly aware that he was feeling dizzy. The sounds in his ears seemed disconnected from the world and the people making them and his head was ringing. He felt light, sort of like he was floating away from his body and the hellish situation that he was currently sat in. It didn't feel real anymore. He had to keep breathing, pushing air in and out of his lungs. He couldn't give up. He had to breathe for himself and Nikki. He would keep her going. He wasn't going to let her go. He'd never let her go.

As each descending peak on the LCD  
Took you a little farther away from me  
Away from me 

He could almost hear the bleeping of the heart monitor inside his head. It was like it was in sync with his heart. If it slowed down, then Harry felt himself slow down. So he focussed everything he had on his own heart beat, willing it to keep Nikki's going. If he could do it, if he could keep his heart going then maybe he could keep hers going too. He wasn't going to let her down.

He was doing exactly that, listening to his own blood being pumped around his body when a frantic looking Leo burst into the waiting room, causing several people to look up, the hope in their eyes turning to disappointment. When he saw Harry, he rushed over. Harry stood up.

"How is she? Have they told you anything?" Leo looked like he was running on pure adrenaline, the terror and fear and pain having not sunken in yet. For the moment, it wasn't Nikki, it was another nameless, faceless person that they were trying to save and praying for.

"Nothing." Harry replied, painfully aware of how resigned his voice sounded. God, it sounded like he'd given up. But he hadn't. He hadn't. He never would. Never. "What happened?" he wasn't quite sure that he wanted to know.

"The suspect was still there. She thought she saw something. He jumped her. He had a knife." It sounded like Leo couldn't form whole, proper sentences. That he was just relaying the information. But that was when the façade slipped. "God, Nikki. Why do you always have to bloody wander off on your own?" Tears looked like they were gathering in his eyes.

Harry couldn't watch. It was hard enough containing his own grief without watching someone else do the same. He listened again to his heart beat. It sounded quieter, further away. No, he denied it. It wasn't true. Nikki was going to be fine.

Amongst the vending machines and year-old magazines  
In a place where we only say goodbye 

Leo had taken the seat beside his when he'd sat down. Harry didn't even register how restless he felt. His eyes flitted from person to person, object to object as he tried to quell the fear and dread that was rising in his throat. But the minute he stopped and thought about what was really going on, would be the moment he lost it. The moment all the carefully built walls would collapse. Two words. All it would take would be two words. But he couldn't think that now, even that made the tears well up.

He hated waiting rooms. A waiting room was for waiting, not for finding out the truth. The truth those within the room didn't necessarily want to hear. Some people spent the worst times in their lives in waiting rooms. But, Harry thought, struggling to keep the dread-lined optimism alive, as long as they were still in the waiting room, Nikki was still alive. Being informed of what had happened during the surgery didn't necessarily mean anything good. So as long as they were here, Harry could believe that she would be alright. That she would pull through.

But the sick feeling of dread kept bringing back that horrible fear. That waiting rooms were where you said goodbye, where you had to accept the worst case scenario. And Harry didn't think he could do that.

It stung like a violent wind that our memories depend  
On a faulty camera in our minds 

Harry drifted away, anxiously trying to escape the misery and anguish around him. He couldn't take it anymore. He switched his thoughts to earlier that morning, before everything around him and Leo had descended. He'd been late, he'd slept through his alarm clock and Nikki had been teasing him about something random. Oh yeah, his jumper had been inside out. He'd been in such a hurry to get out of the house. She'd laughed at him and Harry had tried to be sniffy with her but he hadn't managed it for long. He really had to work on his poker face.

And then Leo had chosen Nikki to go to the crime scene with him, claiming that Harry had too much paper work to catch up on. Harry had been annoyed, he'd wanted to get out, no matter how gruesome the case was. Nikki, noticing his face had grinned, an eyebrow raised and pointed out that if he hadn't been late, he might've got what he'd wanted. On her way out the door, he'd called her a smart arse and said that if they didn't know better, Leo was showing favouritism. Nikki had thrown a pen at him in response.

Harry smiled, just remembering that. They'd been so happy. Everything had seemed so easy. She'd been so happy though, so blissfully unaware of where she'd be a matter of hours later. They'd done so much laughing.

Again, Harry smiled but then, in a flash of panic he realised that he couldn't quite remember the sound of her laugh. Or which side she cocked her head when she was listening to him or Leo. Every image that he'd thought were stored safely in his brain suddenly felt fragile, incomplete. And in that second, he came to painfully understand, that if the worst happened, the memories he would be left with, would not last forever. They wouldn't last that long at all. Already things were fading and he'd seen Nikki less than three hours ago.

And I knew that you were a truth I would rather lose  
Than to have never lain beside at all 

Harry didn't know what his relationship with Nikki was. Whether it was friends, best friends, friends with benefits, partners who saw other people, he didn't know. They hugged and kissed, teased and argued but maybe there were more, deeper feelings. But he couldn't deal with that now. He'd work that out later, when Nikki was okay.

But, whatever it was, he was so pleased to know her. He'd never met anyone quite the same, who shared his sense of humour and understood the passion for the job. She was definitely one of a kind. And that was why she couldn't... why she couldn't leave him. She couldn't go, not yet. Not for a long time.

But whenever it came to situations like this, you could never help thinking that if you'd never met this person, then the pain wouldn't be so hard to see through. It wouldn't be so hard to take. You could live on, ignorant of the pain that you could've been feeling had you known this person.

Except there was one thing wrong with that. Never, not ever, even for a second would Harry wish that he'd never met Nikki. They'd shared too much. He'd leant on her, her on him. The hugs had been there for when the going got tough and when life was good, the one of them was always there to take the piss out of the other, just for fun.

So never would he wish that he hadn't met Nikki.

And I looked around at all the eyes on the ground  
As the TV entertained itself 

Harry looked around again, his thoughts failing once again to focus him. He watched people grieve, watched people wait, watched people hope. But behind all the eyes was that unanimous feeling of dread, so strong it was almost physical. Eyes flickered around the room like sunlight glancing off a watch face but sooner or later, they returned to the ground, staring into space as they prayed. Right then, in those shared moments of pain, no one could comfort anyone else. Everyone was wrapped in their own little world, oblivious to what anyone else was going through.

The small television stood in the corner. Colourful cartoons raced across the screen, almost like it was clamouring for the attention of the people too old to even watch them. Not that anyone was watching it. Eyes glanced at it every now and then as the colours changed but it seemed to be on only to entertain itself, unless it was to entertain children. Odd, considering it was an adult only area.

Harry smiled weakly. The idea of a tele on for the purpose of entertaining itself was an idea that Nikki would've found funny. They would've laughed at it over a drink in the pub. Made stupid jokes and probably got quite wonderfully drunk.

But that wouldn't happen. Even if... when Nikki pulled through, she wouldn't be discharged for a while, let alone allowed to drink alcohol. And Harry wasn't convinced that he would want to share a minor detail, one that he would probably have forgotten about at the end of the day anyway, of what was probably going to end up as the worst day of both of their lives. No. He didn't need to share that pain. Not with her, not with anyone.

'Cause there's no comfort in the waiting room  
Just nervous pacers bracing for bad news 

Leo didn't seem to be able to just sit anymore. He stood up forcefully and walked over to the door, looking out as if hoping to conjure up a nurse who could give them the news that Nikki had fought her way out of the woods. But when it appeared that that had failed, he reverted to pacing.

Harry watched him, his eyes moving dejectedly from left to right, following Leo's path. He could see Leo's lips moving slightly, the cogs in his brain ticking as he tried to digest the worst case scenario, just in case. Harry looked away, he couldn't think like that. He wouldn't think like that.

Glancing around for what must have been the millionth time, Harry wondered about the waiting room. It brought no comfort to its inhabitants. No one felt reassured sitting inside. It was just a room where frantic family, friends and significant others were herded, to keep them out of the way. They were just left there to deal with their rollercoaster emotions, just so they were out of somebody's hair.

Leo snorted in disgust, and wondered vaguely why, in a time of such great fear and sadness, the mind can still wander over useless and irrelevant subjects. It didn't make sense and he felt guilty for not having one hundred percent of his attention on Nikki. Misery and soul consuming guilt surged through his blood as he thought that if these were Nikki's last few moments on Earth, he'd just let her down entirely by thinking about something random. He ran his hands through his hair and this time he didn't stop the tears that were fighting to escape. They dripped down his face and he felt Leo touch his arm gently, almost hesitantly.

And then the nurse comes 'round and everyone lift their heads 

Suddenly, above all the noise, footsteps could be heard coming down the hallway. Harry felt Leo raise his head but he didn't have the energy to do the same. His eyes stayed glued to the floor. As much as tried, he just couldn't tear his eyes, or his thoughts out of the rut that they were stuck in. He couldn't move, he almost felt like he couldn't breathe.

It was like he was freezing to death, frozen in that moment and so cold despite the stuffy room. He knew that Leo was staring at the nurse, he could feel the tenseness rolling off him in waves. As if staring was going to make the news good...

He heard the nurse begin to speak, but he couldn't hear the words, he couldn't make sense of them. All he could think of was Nikki, the fact that she was the one in surgery, the one fighting for her life. Because he had been late, she had been hurt. He was so stupid! There was suddenly shouting inside his head, voices berating him and telling him how stupid he was. And he was. He was stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid man! It was all his fault. If he hadn't been sitting in crowded room of grieving people, he might have started bashing his head with his fists. But he still couldn't move, other than to shake his head as he tried to disperse the voices. The possibility that it was shock stood hesitantly on the edge of his mind, unsure whether making a show of itself would be useful or not.

But I'm thinking of what Sarah said 

He barely heard Leo break down into tears. He couldn't move, couldn't move a muscle because he'd finally heard the words washing out of the nurse's mouth. He didn't even register the tears streaming down his face, he didn't notice them. Because suddenly his world had imploded, fallen in on top of him. Because one of the most important people in his life had just left him, given up like he'd never thought she would. And that meant the end, the end of everything whether she was a friend, relative or lover.

That love is watching someone die 

He didn't know what to do. He just sat there. Leo's sobs bypassed his ears, he was simply, frozen. In shock. Unable to think or function properly. It had to be a joke, someone was going to pop up and shout surprise and then Nikki would walk through the doorway, battle scarred but alive. She hadn't died, she couldn't have died.

Please no. Please, please no.

So who's gonna watch you die? So who's gonna watch you die?

Please no. Please, God, no.


End file.
